A cool, college girl Lesbian, dark-eyed and competent, who draws on her cigarette holder and remembers her “past.”
A bone-skinny kid with made-up cheeks, who does a long, long tongue kiss with a passing friend at midnight in my corner bar.
An elderly gentleman in a perfect tweed suit who owns a mansion and loves you sweetly with his eyes.
An intense black minister who is struggling to build gay awareness among black kids.
Two sultry, muscular college boys in striped pullovers who sit shoulder-to-shoulder and stare raptly across my living room.
These are homosexuals I’ve known in Washington.
An argumentative astronomy professor-turned-activist striding down Pennsylvania Avenue to the gates of the White House to lodge a gay rights protest.
A shy, pock-marked drag queen who, when inspired in drag, shines with all the magic of stardom.
A thin Lesbian musician, who sings stories of women in a voice that’s uneven, but loving and strong.
A frizzy-haired science professor who is traditionally absent-minded but can tell you every minute of his nights in the orgy rooms of San Francisco.
A high school kid from Bethesda who rides his bicycle ten miles each week to a gay college coffee house.
The owner of a leather bar, in boots and black jacket, who beneath his rough exterior cares very much about his gay brothers.
I’ve known these homosexuals in Washington too.
There are a minimum of 150,000 of us here. In Baltimore there are that many more. We are fat, thin, tall, short, butch, femme, brilliant, ordinary, rich, poor, and in-between. Probably there is nothing we all have in common except the experience of learning that the kind of love which is natural to us is different from what the world expects. This is an important, often painful discovery — one fundamental enough to give us all a common outlook. It is a brave outlook, full of cheerful good humor. More and more today it is an outlook of mutual loyalty. It is a belief that we can work together to build a good gay world to live in together, however well or poorly we may fare in our individual dealings with that other, outer, “straight” world of careers, family, and cold everyday living.
We are building our own gay city.
— Cade Ware, “Gay Washington … High, Wide, and All Kinds of Handsome,” in Just Us: A Directory of the Washington Gay Community (1975).
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